Cancer Survival 1.1
I have had so many people ask me "Are you sure you even have Cancer?"..because damn.."You make it look so easy"... at first I was insulted...outraged even...I mean....are you KIDDING?? Having Cancer isn't hard enough with your dumb ass comments....but now I look back I can honestly say POSITIVITY is the only way to be..and I don't say that lightly...because I have gone through many a dark moment during this ongoing battle.
It's not always easy to be positive I hear you say...but in actual fact it really is...I went and continue to go through the horrible "Fatigue" after each chemo...the first being the worst because it hit me out of nowhere and I had NO clue how to deal with it. Then I read up on it...and it told me to be "more active"...I almost fell over laughing...I was like..."How the fuck do I be MORE active when I can barely keep my eyes open or even get up to do the simplest things?"
But that is what it said so when I went through chemo no 2..the minute I felt the fatigue...I got the heck up...went for a walk ...when I say walk it was more like dragging myself down the road looking like a zombie...to the park and back thinking I would probably pass out along the way..thank you "POKEMON GO" for keeping me going!!!
But in fact I felt a little more energetic..I could not believe it had actually worked. So when I got back home, for good measure, I got into my elliptical machine and went crazy for a few songs...and LO BEHOLD..it worked...I had energy again, so when they tell you to be more active..they are NOT kidding...Give it a try and you will see what I mean, and I can promise you the energy really comes back...oh and another thing...if you are able to...on the day of chemo, when you get home....drink as much water and you can...YES!! You will pee for England...but you pee out the toxins a lot faster out your system when you flushing it out...and do it for the first 2/3 days I say...
I went through about 2/3 ltrs a day and I felt it help immensely and got the chemo out a lot faster so that I could carry on with normal everyday life again. I won't lie losing my hair was the worst part of all of this for me..worse than everything else I have had to go through thus far.
I had beautiful waist length hair that I had grown over the years and had exactly how I wanted it to be, and to lose what I can had cut off previously within nearly the space of a day...I won't lie...hits you damn damn hard...because it's our identity, who we are. Cancer is the one thing that attacks our identity the worst..in more ways than one, especially what it takes from us..possibly we lose 1...2...or ALL of the below..depending on the type of Breast Cancer you have:
Hair
Eyebrows
Eyelashes
Breasts
Ovaries
Looking at the above list..pretty much EVERYTHING that makes us a woman we lose, people will say.."It's a small price to pay for being alive"...and its easy for people to say that..until they go through it themselves and come to the realisation just how BIG a sacrifice we have had to make to stay alive.
Some will be lucky and not lose the above, I unfortunately am NOT one of those lucky and I will lose pretty much everything above....so far I still have eyebrows and eyelashes...so on that front I may get lucky, but as for the others, they will be taken/ have already been taken, and will have to learn how to re-define what it is to be a WOMAN.
And yet somehow knowing all of this I still manage to remain POSITIVE. I guess for me it is about being alive. To have an Oncology appointment and told to my face, if I had decided to leave going to a doctor when I noticed my breast changes a week to two, I would be fighting a very different fight. I would have been fighting for "TIME" and not "RECOVERY/ REMISSION"...that really puts a lot of things in perspective for you....suddenly the little trivial things in life don't seem to matter as much as they used to...
To know that I am fighting towards RECOVERY, that is my inspiration and where all my positivity comes from..knowing I am going to live, compared to so many that are not as lucky as me to get such news, and for them my heart hurts so badly, knowing just how close I came to being one of them.
90% of it is of the mind, outlook, friends, family keeping me going...and 10% is my body that is so amazing and fighting this cancer so very hard for me right now that I am in super AWE and amazement of it for what it is doing to fight and keep me alive, another lesson learnt..I will NEVER again take my body for granted for what it has done/ is doing for me.
So if I cam impart anything to anyone going through Cancer, no matter how big or small, try to remember everything POSITIVE and try put that back out there in your approach to this horrible disease...DON'T give it power...even if your fight is a different one to mine....make it on YOUR TERMS and not Cancer's.
Look at the first 3 letters of CANcer...CAN....you CAN DO THIS...YOUR WAY xx
